Erotic attachments and cruel optimism: Sexual fantasy as affective impasse

Sex is routinely framed as a site of repair: with the right communication, technique or therapeutic work, intimacy will heal damage and secure coherence. This article asks what happens when that promise wears thin. Reading Berlant and Edelman's Sex, or the Unbearable alongside Berlant's later work and Freeman's notion of chrononormativity, I theorize contemporary sexuality as a scene of maintenance structured by cruel optimism and organized by time. I argue that erotic optimism now attaches not only to the fantasy of ‘better sex’ but also to a chrononormative arc in which desire should build, crest, resolve and, with sufficient labour, eventually arrive. Therapy culture, sex education and platformized dating translate structural non-relation into ongoing self-regulation, recoding endurance as an ethical project of continuous improvement. Drawing on disability and illness discourses, I show how crip and sick temporalities trouble this mandate by improvising non-teleological tempos that dominant scripts then misrecognize as lack. Across these sites, sexual subjects are compelled to stay ‘in circulation’ – tracking, optimizing and narrating their erotic lives – even as the structural mismatch between what sex is asked to do and what it can do persists. In this way, swipe culture, intimacy industries and therapeutic sex education materialize cruel optimism in erotic time.